My favorite project of the year so far: Ardusat - Your Arduino Experiment in Space

I've talked a lot about the importance of people being able to explore space on their own. People are not content to sit back and let bureaucracies do the exploration for them any more. You've heard me pushing for more platforms in space where people could do their own experiments affordably, and by golly, someone went out and made one.
Ardusat is a Cubesat that will be launched into orbit that will contain an Arduino on board. This makes it one of the first open hardware systems to fly into space!

Here is where I grab you by the shoulders and yell in your face.

Do you understand what this means?!?!

As you can see, I'm somewhat excited by this.

People keep coming up with possible uses, the list keeps growing. Here are a few:

photographing the skies over Europe

Detect meteors over a broad area

sample the upper atmosphere

send out a HAM Radio beacon

there's even a bingo game idea using a Geiger counter

And get this ... for only $325 you get 3 days of time on the satellite in space.

3 DAYS for $325!

You can get a week for $500.

Your experiment in space just dropped from millions of dollars to hundreds of dollars.

Their kickstarter project ends in just a day or so. So hopefully you've already seen it and contributed. If not, hurry up!

New design

We've moved to squarespace so we can concentrate on writing and publishing awesome content instead of spending a lot of time mucking with servers. The podcast feed is being moved and will be back up in a day or two.